Where’s George Synchronicity Callback

 

 

On May 2, I popped over to Meijer’s for my weekly Covid-bound groceries run; in front of the library at the entrance, I passed a dead cat. It was particularly upsetting, because it looked so much like my pal Jack when he was less than a year old. I went about my errands, aired-up the left rear tire on our car, grabbed some groceries, a utility light I’d been looking for recently, and a couple extra plastic bags, then parked at the library and recovered the body. Of course, it wasn’t Jack – he was in the back yard when I left, and was waiting by the gate when I returned – but May 2 happened to be Jack’s tenth birthday. The cat I found looked well cared-for; somebody loved him. An electronic stud-finder is nothing more than a hand-held metal detector, and the one I had had failed a while back, so I ordered one to pick up at the nearby Home Depot. On the way, I ended up behind a fire truck heading to an horrific accident… a destroyed SUV in the middle of High School Road, another up in the grass. Paramedics and police at the scene, an ambulance on its way from 38^th street. Odd thing, just as I got to the accident scene, a big black spider that looked something like a crab, skittled across the dash and hopped onto the steering wheel – didn’t spook me, I blew on him and he fell off, but still… anyway – back home, I tested the cat, and the new stud finder detected metal around the back of his neck. Several times. Tested it on other items – something was in his neck, so I took him to the nearest Vet, who came out and tried to read his chip – but, no results. If it was a chip, which I think it was, it had failed or been damaged in the accident. And, to prove the first rule of synchronicity – no good deed goes unpunished – halfway home from the Vet, I ran over a long yellow screw that stuck into – of course – the tire I’d aired up earlier. Tick tick tick tick, four times per second, all the way home. Still have great memories of the night Tessa gave birth to Jack and his sisters…

Over the next week, I was surprised to find that thirteen-inch tires had become a difficult to find commodity in Indiana; the store that sold me several over the years didn’t carry them any longer, and the manager seemed rather shocked, or distressed, that I’d dared asked for one. He did assure me that a sister store fifty miles away had one (maybe), and I could drive there on my nifty yellow screw. A few days later, his nearest competitor, a block away, managed to scare one up for me.

A couple of days after the purchase, I opened up the utility light – it was DOA, and wouldn’t charge. Busy and distracted, I didn’t get around to returning it until May 16. I expected the purchase price to be refunded via debit card, and was surprised when the clerk handed me cash, wrapped in my receipt. I didn’t look at the cash again for a few days; in between, late at night, I thought about the time I played a little synchronicity game of mine with “Where’s George,” and decided to check my bills – something I hadn’t done for years. I had to change my password; it had been so long since I’d logged on.

Looking at the bills on May 20, I noticed the $1 bill on top had a “Where’s George” stamp on it, so I went back to the website and entered the bill. It had traveled 24 miles in the 154 days since it had first been entered.

Certainly, there are no earth-shattering coincidences here, and nothing prophetic; no predictive value in my observing the oddball confluences in my life. Still, it did take a dead cat on his look-alike’s birthday, a traffic accident and a creepy jumping spider, a yellow screw, a bit of a run-around looking for a tire, a dead utility light and a cash refund, all perfectly chained together, to get me back to Where’s George with a new entry, and the starting point of this silly blog of mine, 14 years since it began. It’s funny, what we notice, once we begin looking for it.

Almost forgot – the day I got my new tire, I wandered around with my camera for two hours, and found, in the grass in front of the tire shop – another dollar bill. Guess I should enter this fellow into the George database.

Synchronicity and Where's George May 2007

 

A Killer on the Road

There's a killer on the road
His brain is squirmin' like a toad

                                                  — Riders on the Storm, The Doors

It's Halloween morning, the sun isn't up yet.  On Facebook, I saw a picture with the following text:

"Fun Fact* The average person walks past a murderer 36 times in their life.
* It's a fun fact because they didn't kill you."

There were already a number of postings regarding killers other readers had come across in their lifetimes.  The following is one of ours, trimmed from a much longer version:

At the time, Flo and I were investigating an historical crime that had occurred over a century before here in Indianapolis, and as the calendar was a match with that of the murders, Flo and I returned to the scene with newspaper clippings, camera and camcorder, to walk the scene on the exact anniversary.  More than a hundred years ago, this place was isolated, a popular rendezvous for lovers.  Today, the site is at the edge of a public golf course.

We followed our countdown to the double-loaded shotgun blast that took the first victim's life, and the report of the .44 that killed his wife.  We noted the escape route of one of the killers-two boys fishing on the East bank were repeatedly shot at by a man with a pistol, advancing from the sandbar where the bodies lay.  The balls struck near enough that they sent the boys scrambling into the woods-from where they watched a man cross a bridge that no longer stands today.  They returned to their fishing-only to be fired upon again by what appeared to be the same man, several hours later.  The man crossed back to the West side, shortly before the wife's body was doused in coal oil and set ablaze.

After only about ten minutes of filming at the site, the camcorder battery went dead, and the camera shut down.  Very odd, because it was a new two-hour battery that had been fully charged the night before, just for this outing.  Not quite rain, but more of a wet mist dropped to the sand bar, much as it had that same evening over a century before.  Another argument against a smoldering calico dress that waited three hours to burst into flames.  We packed up our gear and headed back a little earlier than we had intended.  The mist was gone before we left the golf course.

At the foot of the hill, we looked up and saw two golfers coming down from the fourth tee; these retired gentlemen were cheerful and a nice contrast to a surly fellow we'd met earlier.  As we passed them on the incline, I noticed a young man in the shadows of the trees that encircle the creek, and instinctively I moved to Flo's left side, to place myself between her and the stranger.

I can't quite articulate it, but there was something wrong about this fellow.  Perhaps he was a little shifty-eyed, perhaps something about his gait implied more of a lurk than a stroll.  I noticed an unlit cigarette in his hand, and anticipated his approaching me for a light, since I had a lit cigarette in my hand.  We passed all manner of people in this public venue; golfers, bicyclers, children playing, couples and individuals walking and jogging.  I just didn't want this particular fellow to get near us for some reason.

Flo took a cue from me and we picked up our pace a little, but not obviously.  As we passed the young man, neither of us said a word, and I felt some relief-but about ten feet past, he turned and raised his cigarette and in words I couldn't make out all of asked for a light; I raised my cigarette and, as if I had misunderstood his request, cheerily said "Sorry, last one!"  He mumbled something I'm glad I didn't hear, and we booked toward the parking lot.  A hundred yards or so from the gorge, I glanced over my left shoulder and made sure he wasn't following us.

The next evening, blurbs for the upcoming 6 o'clock news told of a breaking story, about a murder that took place on a golf course.  I saw an ambulance backed up on the green, and yellow crime scene tape around trees cordoning off the crime scene.  Wilbur L. Colen Jr., 69, had been shot during a robbery while golfing.  A young man approached Wilbur and his party with an unlit cigarette, asking for a light.  Some rudeness ensued as he interrupted the golfers at tee, and he walked away, only to return moments later, producing a pistol.  Colen's grandson-in-law had attempted to wrestle the pistol from the robber, who, when free, raised the gun and fired one shot into Wilbur Colen's chest.  Colen died at Wishard Hospital at approximately 5:15 P.M.

By the late news, James Sears had been arrested for the robbery and killing, and had added kidnapping to a growing list of charges.  The next day, from newspaper photos and video-taped news broadcasts, we identified Sears as the young man who had approached us at the fourth tee; the same place where Colen was killed.

Flo and I discussed the situation, and decided to call the police and see if they were interested in our experience from the previous day.  Sears, in an arrogant TV interview, insisted that the robbery and murder were both unintentional.  That didn't seem to be the case, if he had been lurking about the fourth tee with an unlit cigarette, 24 hours before.

The police turned out to be very interested in what we had to say.  While they had all the witnesses and evidence necessary to convict him of murder, our testimony would rebut his only excuse - that it went down as a spontaneous response to the rudeness of the golfers.  We could prove that Sears had been stalking for a kill.

To make a long story short-we went through the interviews and depositions, and ended up as the final two witnesses in another murder trial from that scene-126 years apart from the original.

Sears was convicted on all counts, and sentenced to 200 years in prison.

 UPI Archive

 Flo, between the two murder scenes.

150th Anniversary, Sept. 12, 2018

Dark Dreams and Synchronicity

 

 

(AI Illustration)

 (Originally published in Twisted Dreams Magazine, June 2008)

The summer I turned five, my parents’ first new house was being built. We made many trips to the place that would soon be home; exciting, interminable drives to the inner clockworks of a child. The route to this new world slowly became familiar – a winding road from the comfortably old to the exquisitely new. From playing around a forbidding, locked carriage house in an alley to standing on ripped and clotted amber clay, in utter awe of the neat concrete slab, pipe-and-wiring entrails and a growing skeleton of wood. I shuffled too close once, gouging my ankle on a rusty rebar snake that hadn’t yet been trimmed, and left behind a bloody trail. I can still find the scar if I look for it.

Bulldozers tore away farm and trees and almost everything that wasn’t fresh and new; just about everything that held a memory of what once was. Bright light, the scents of spackle and paint; symmetry and order, Formica and plastics replaced the must and ochre, the rich shadows and contours, the haunted cellars and mystical grape-arbors, the burdened and elder weight of the only home I’d known. It was a newborn world, and I ran with the other children in the freshly-sodded meadow behind our houses, before wood slat and wire fencing cubed-off our homes into distinctive principalities, forbidden zones and the occasional no-man’s lands.

Still, I dreamed of cemeteries. Solemn men and women dressed in black wide-brimmed hats, long coats and dark shawls. Of roughshod hills and gullies, of protruding belly-mounds of earth, of crude stone, and wooden markers. Of a silent procession in the black of night, led by torches, delivering a black casket to its grave amidst bare trees and cloud-swathed moonlight.

And the sporadic visits by the Blue People.

Facing our house: to the left, another young couple, a girl and a boy; playmates. To the right, a quiet couple, who at least seemed elderly to a kindergartener. In between, the little pink house, home.

I remember it as a balmy summer night when I was perhaps seven – it could have been spring or fall, but there wasn’t the feeling of school encroaching. It had been too quiet, too peaceful, too idyllic an evening for something not to have happened. The shriek of a woman, the sounds of clatter and activity. The insistent pounding on the door. My father, a police officer, answering the call for help from our quiet neighbors in the brick house.

Activity. Adults – raised voices followed by murmurs, soft sobs. Porch lights and flashlights, and neighbors congregating in the yard, in front of the brick house. Whispers and shushing and “Stay in the house!”

I wandered out to the front steps but dared not go any further. They were looking at something in the front yard, not far from the curb; flashlights playing over something that looked like stone. “Who could have done this?” and words like “Cruel” and “Heartless bastards” drifted over from next door.

Hurried trips in and out of the house. Phone calls. “Stay out of the way.” A police cruiser arrived, and uniformed cops peered at the object, talked to witnesses, took notes. Somewhere in there, the object was taken away. The couple from the brick house clung together. Stooped as if from a great weight, heartsick, they returned to their home. Neighbors and police left. The porch lights clicked off one by one.

Aroused by a noise, perhaps a loud dull thud, the couple from the brick house had found a grave stone had landed in their front lawn. It belonged to their son, who had been killed in the Korean War.

They were convinced that night that it had been a cruel prank. How could it possibly be anything else? What were the odds? Who could have done it?

Over the next few days, there was a thorough investigation. An old cemetery nearby was being moved to make way for another housing development. That particular night, an overloaded flatbed truck rumbled down our street. This gravestone and this one only fell off of the truck and landed in our neighbor’s front yard, past the curb and into the grass.

None of the workers knew our neighbors or where they lived. No knowledge, no intent, no malice was ever discovered.

From then on, I remember our neighbors in the brick house, who used to smile and talk across the fence, as gray and silent and broken as the slab that fell into their yard that night.

It was some time after I was married that I was told that the little pink house, and most of our neighbors’ homes, were built on the site of another old country cemetery.

                                                          (AI Illustration)

 

About where we lived before:

Balloon Synchronicity

Looking back, I suppose I was a strange, nerdy teenager. One lonely summer, I took some of my photographs, wrote some of my poetry on the backsides, affixed the photos to the strings of helium balloons, and launched them into the sky. I wondered if they would ever be found.

On our first date, I bought a helium balloon, and Flo and I wrote something on a card and sent it up. It became a small hobby, an occasional indulgence for us to fly off a balloon with a note, a photograph or even a postcard attached. Once, a balloon made it all the way to the East side of the city, and drifted down onto some fellow' s driveway; he was kind enough to return the card with a comment.

One spring day, at the Broad Ripple Art Fair, we bought a helium balloon along with some other treasures, and returned home. Normally a small helium balloon would not last the night, drifting down to the floor before sunup. This time, the balloon was still pressed firmly against the ceiling when we rose the next day, so we took it with us to the Indianapolis Museum of Art, and launched it from the grounds with a self-addressed postcard attached. I certainly did not expect it to go far, thinking it had at best an hour or two of flight left.

The summer passed by quickly, and we did not expect the postcard to return. One day though, the card arrived at our P.O. Box, with a short note and several thumbtack holes to suggest it had been on display for a while. The card was postmarked at Point Pleasant, West Virginia. It had drifted down at the Ohio and West Virginia border, and crossed over to West Virginia after it was mailed. Of all the places it could have ended up, it was a bit odd to me that it had traversed the replacement for the Silver Bridge, at the very site where The Mothman Prophecies took place.

Over the years, we occasionally sent balloons aloft with postcards or notes, and our son enjoyed joining in on our hobbies and adventures. One day, while we all were headed to the grocery store, I noticed something drifting down from the sky toward the parking lot. A small helium balloon with a postcard attached floated down to a height I could reach up and snatch it. The activities director of an Illinois Senior Center had provided balloons and postcards for the residents as entertainment one day. I returned the postcard with a note, and the message I sent was eventually published in an article in a local newspaper serving the area of the Senior Center.

What are the odds?

It's been years now, since we last floated off a message attached to a helium balloon, but I'm sure that someday we will do it again.

Elsie

Elsie and daughter Helen

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/66133114/elsie-towne

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/48907805/helen-p-kenney

Things That Go “Uuuungh” In The Night

Last Monday AM, around 1:50, Flo was sitting at my computer, and I was in my chair, about 10 feet away. She’d been doing some online research, and turned to chat with me – we’d been talking for a few minutes, and she was mid-sentence when a loud noise practically drowned her out.

It was a very load moan or groan, “Uuuungh,” deep and resonant. The best I can describe it: as if someone had plunged a butcher knife into the gut of a large, robust old man. To me, the sound appeared directly between us. Flo told me that she thought it might have come from out back, though the window and door in that direction were shut tight. Still, we checked both out front and back, and found nothing whatsoever to account for the sound.

Sounds rarely rouse me when I’m asleep (my Brown Noise track drowns out everything), and if they do, if I can’t find anything to account for them, I write the experience off as an artifact from dreaming. But, when something like this happens when I’m awake, and there’s a witness, that shines a different light on the phenomenon.

Micro-anomalies are for the most part overlooked, I think, because there is simply nothing of value that you can extrapolate from them, at least not individually. If, say, tens of thousands of fish or frogs dropped from a clear sky into your neighborhood, it would provoke mass speculation; theories would abound, and range from freakish weather to black holes to Biblical plagues.

We’ve lived in this house for a number of years now, and while we’ve had a fair share of these micro-anomalies, the “groaning old man” is not a regular occurrence; nor am I inclined to call TAPS and report a haunting. If the groan appeared regularly, I’d be sure to record and time it, and stake out various possible entry points – but I doubt he – whatever “he” might be, will cooperate.

The natural tendency is to toe-tag such happenings and file them away in the “unexplained” drawer. The event is neither broad nor significant enough to make any useful speculations about – and if you dwell on it enough, you will look like a nut to everybody else.

I once approached an ATM just as the woman ahead of me left; the machine displayed “Thank you, Mrs. Stanton” for a few seconds, and I turned to see her climb into an elegant white car with an Ohio license plate. I never saw her before, and had no idea if she was related to me – in fact, the happenstance is only significant if I feel that it is to me – yet it is not a commonplace occurrence. How often might I have stood behind or in front of another Stanton in some line somewhere, and simply not known it? What were the odds that I would have noticed this time?

Synchronicity can be incidental – such as a name or verbal pun – or a physical event – something tangible beyond syntax and the coincidences of language.

One Thanksgiving when I was a teenager, we heard the screech of tires, and an ensuing ruckus out front – a child had bolted from our next door neighbor’s front yard, and a middle-aged woman had almost hit her – in fact, she had run over the very tips of the little girl’s shoes; the child was unharmed, but both she and the driver were almost in shock from the near-tragedy. The driver was rushing home after making a last moment purchase for the holiday dinner. She wanted everything to be perfect, because her son, who lived out of state, was visiting for the first time in years.

Almost exactly an hour later, another screech, another ruckus out front. Another neighborhood child, about the same age as the first, bolted into the street, from the same place in the same yard. This time, she was hit, and her leg was broken. You guessed it – this driver was the first driver’s son, who didn’t want to be late for Thanksgiving dinner.

This was on a quiet side-street, not a thoroughfare. There was no geographical reason why a child would choose to cross at this point over any other, and neither child had been visiting next door. Both had just been walking along, and for no understandable reason, had chosen that place and moment to run across the street.

Micro-anomalies – the eerie confluence of implied purpose and possibility – if you catalog enough of these, they just might be sufficient to entertain a dinner guest or two, but they also have a cumulative, disquieting effect. Like a pixel-glitch, a video-hiccup in the face of the person across from you.

At the signpost, up ahead…


While you're at it, check out the publications below - I have an article and three photos in Twisted Dreams, and a photo on the title page in NexGen Pulp.

Order Twisted Dreams Magazine

NexGen Pulp Subscription

Synchronicity and "Where's George?"

“Where’s George?” (http://www.wheresgeorge.com/)– the Internet bill-tracking project – is generally either an obsession or a “Who Cares?” proposition. A couple of weeks ago, I was razzed by a Blockbuster employee for passing some marked Georges. He couldn’t think of anything more boring than tracking where your money goes. That is, perhaps, other than working the night shift at Blockbuster.

Curiosity seems to be the primary motivation driving the average George aficionado; though some rather ambitious enthusiasts have circulated marked bills numbering at or near 100,000.

By common standards, I’m not a rabid “Georger,” having only “EMS’ed” (Enter-Mark-Spend) a tad over 500 bills in a year and a half – more avid hobbyists will put that many bills out in a week or two, forsaking debit cards and other electronic transactions for the opportunity to circulate more green.

For me, it is an experiment in and perhaps a barometer for synchronicity. It is the odds and oddities, the stories – an initiative marker for the eerily recombinant possibilities in life.

Most “George” hits are mundane and disappointing, I’ll admit. Most bills that have been re-entered into the system have traveled a scant few miles, and been re-entered by people curious enough to login and type in the serial number, but not sufficiently cooperative to enter a note where the bill was received, nor inquisitive enough to follow the links to our web site.

Still, a few are out of the commonplace enough to keep me interested. One $1 bill left Steak & Shake here in Indianapolis, and was registered in California a couple of months later, having been picked up by said Californian on the island of Bonaire, in the Netherlands Antilles.

One left Steak & Shake only to return to South Bend Indiana when received in gambling winnings in Las Vegas. One was found on a sidewalk in Bloomington, IN. One was received in change at a fast-food restaurant in KY moments before the fellow was nearly killed by a drive-by shooter.

More prolific “Georgers” than I have astounding stories to tell, including receiving the same bill back in change months or years later; one bill I saw was re-entered by a cop who had found it on a dead body.

My fishing expedition for synchronicity paid off in pleasant strangeness only a few months after I’d begun. One evening, while too tired to accomplish anything particularly useful, I got out a box where I’d stashed the occasional silver certificate, two-dollar bill or other odd currency to enter into the online George database – one dollar that I’d received in change perhaps 10 years ago, was stamped

WARNING THIS "NOTE" IS NOT LAWFUL MONEY, THEREFORE IT IS NOT LEGALLY TAXABLE NOR IS IT REDEEMABLE IN LAWFUL MONEY, PER ARTICLE 1, SECTION 10, U.S. CONSTITUTION.

-not wanting to accidentally pass it on, I had tossed it into the oddity box, and it was promptly forgotten.

Out of curiosity, to see if other bills with the same serial number had been entered into the “Where’s George?” database, I entered the serial number and series info. Another bill of the same exact serial number, but different series (different year), had been entered, and less than two weeks before.

The fellow who entered that bill was unique, himself:

“Skozey Fetisch, the musical project of Mark C. Jackman, started out in Salt Lake City, Utah, and relocated to the Bay Area in 1992. Jackman is also a visual artist who is as comfortable working with oils and canvas as he is with computers and software to actualize his artistic vision.Jackman began his musical career playing in gothic bands in the early 1980's. Tiring of this, Jackman went on to do everything from composing film scores to composing and dancing to modern dance music for the Ririe-Woodbury International dance tour. Skozey Fetisch does what an artist does best: challenges and stimulates the observer. Momma:Key is for those who can accept that challenge.”

That brought me to purchasing a couple of “Skozey” CDs; the above quoted review is quite apropos. They are great soundtracks to listen to while writing.

(http://www.myspace.com/skozeyfetisch)

So, this little foray into proactive synchronicity paid off, if in ways that perhaps are interesting only to me.

Some other “Georgers” appreciate the synchronicity factor, if only in quest of a sort of god.

Still, without any provocation such as “Georging,” life manages to churn out the oblique coincidence, the synchronistic pun, the ominous innuendo… and the deadly retrospective.

I have perhaps more than my fair, if not mathematically probable, share of those; something to touch upon again, in the near future.